Local 913, Episode 47: Arlo Aldo

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Arlo Aldo front man, David Manchester made the decision to move to Pittsburgh with his wife in 2011 not really knowing what they would find when they arrived:

“We didn’t know anything about the city. We just drew circles on a map and said “Alright that’s where we’re going!” I grew up right outside of DC, I spent some time in Portland, OR, but finished up in Baltimore. I had a band in Baltimore that was very different. It was much more on the slow-core/shoegaze/5 delays pedals in line on a pedal board kind of band. When we moved up here, I knew I wanted to start something new here and kind of take a fresh take on music and re-evaluate my songwriting.”

What resulted from that re-evaluation is one of the best indie-folk Americana outfits in the city, Arlo Aldo. Of the band name, Manchester admits that Arlo came from a name he had picked out for his son. While the baby name got shot down, he decided to go use it for his newly formed band:

“The weird thing is, is that almost everything we’ve done with the band, something will just feel right and then in hindsight we’ll realize that there will be a deeper meaning that is very connected. It was later I found out there was an Italian architect named Aldo. He became famous for his philosophy on designing cemeteries. How the cemetery is a place for the dead to congregate, where they can continue to be together and live together and be a community. I thought there was something very romantic about that sense of that the first name “Arlo”, something I had picked out for my son, was this idea of birth. Then there was Aldo, tied the architect where this idea of continuing life after death and being remembered.”

Arlo Aldo’s new album House & Home will be released Feb 27 at Commonwealth Press Warehouse on The South Side. For more on the band, go to their website.